Dave Thomas walked into an election booth in the borough building to vote early on Tuesday and found a folded Citizens for Haines flier with a list of issues and candidates to vote for left inside.
He crumpled it up and shoved it in his pocket, then finished voting and left the building. It wasn’t until he got home and told his wife that he realized he should have reported it to the clerk.
“I don’t think it was purposefully left there,” he said. “It was a folded thing that somebody got in the mail and brought into the booth.”
Borough clerk Mike Denker said Wednesday that a phone call about it, then a separate email he got from Gershon Cohen was the first he’d heard of the incident. Cohen wrote Denker and borough manager Alekka Fullerton to note that the flier left in a voting booth violates electioneering laws and counts as campaign misconduct.
“It’s hard to imagine someone accidentally left it behind and it is of course totally egregious,” he wrote.
He also said borough staff should be checking every booth in between voter visits to make sure things like the flier don’t get left behind. Denker said that’s something election staff already do, though it can be difficult when a lot of voters show up at once and it gets busy.
The flier was mailed by Citizens for Haines, an independent expenditure group. The flier, which encourages people to vote, says they should vote for fiscally minded candidates, those who support the Lutak Dock project, and asks them to take the “politics out of planning.’ It also lists support for specific local assembly candidates, planning commission candidates and for both mayoral candidates.
Group organizer Randa Szymanski said it was mailed to people in the valley who did not vote last year and was not intended for people to leave in the voting booth.
“It was to get them to realize what was on the ballot this year,” she said. “All we’re trying to do is encourage people to vote.”
State and local law prohibit electioneering at or within 200 feet of a polling place and a listing on the front door of the borough building lists “notes” or “newspapers” as prohibited items.
And Denker initially said while election workers couldn’t control what people do in the voting booth, they would have to be asked to leave those items behind if seen walking into the building with them.
But upon reflection, and checking the code, Denker said his read is that electioneering requires that someone be trying to use those items with the “intent to persuade another person,” in order for it to fall under the definition of electioneering.
He said he re-printed the sign on the front door of the building to make it clear that people could use voting aids for their own purposes.
Mayor Tom Morphet put a similar type of ad in the Chilkat Valley News last week, listing the “Mayor’s Picks on Ballot Questions.” Morphet said he took that ad out, which is designed for people to cut out of the paper, so that people could keep track of the five questions on the ballot.
“We just assume that people all know this stuff inside and out,” he said. “I don’t have any problem with anybody carrying in something to remind themselves what’s on the ballot.”